Yotam Orchan

Yotam Orchan's picture
Short Interest: 
My main interest I have is to understand animal movement or 'why does the animal move in such a pattern and not another?
Interest: 

I focus on one fundamental component of animal movement, which is the navigation capacity of the individual, in other words, its ability to navigate to a desired destination in a favored timing.
My model species is Stone curlew (Burhinus oedicnemus), a non-migratory, nocturnal and social bird. We found that this bird is capable of remarkable navigation performance on large spatial scales.
Currently my goals are: (a) To examine the capacity of SCs to perform True Navigation. This includes the quantification of familiar home range size and assessment of homing performance beyond that familiar home range. (b) To elucidate the cues used by stone curlews for homing and to assess their relative importance (if more than a single cue is found). (c) To assess the influence of two internal factors on the homing motivation. (1) How breeding opportunity changes homing motivation? (2) Does True Navigation performance improve with experience?
For the current study I use mini-GPS loggers with solar panels mounted on the birds for long periods. For analysis I compare their local and large-scale movements to a model from the family of random walk models.

Degree: 
Ph. D
Role: 
Alumni
Years: 
2009-2021
Phone: 
+972-(0)2-6586080
Fax: 
+972-(0)2-6586080
Address: 
IAF - Avian Ecologist

Publications

Toledo, S., D. Shohami, I. Schiffner, E. Lourie, Y. Orchan, Y. Bartan, and R. Nathan, (2020) Cognitive map-based navigation in wild bats revealed by a new high-throughput wildlife tracking system | Science 188-193 : 369
Toledo, S., Y. Orchan, D. Shohami, M. Charter, and R. Nathan, (2018) Physical-Layer Protocols for Lightweight Wildlife Tags with Internet-of-Things Transceivers | IEEE 19th International Symposium on" A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks"(WoWMoM)
Orchan, Y., O. Ovaskainen, W. Bouten, and R. Nathan, (2016) Novel insights into the map stage of true navigation in non-migratory wild birds (stone curlews, Burhinus oedicnemus) | The American Naturalist E152-E165 : 187
Weller-Weiser, A., Y. Orchan, R. Nathan, M. Charter, A. J. Weiss, and S. Toledo, (2016) Characterizing the accuracy of a self-synchronized reverse-GPS wildlife localization system. | The 15th International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN '16), Vienna, Austria 1-12
Toledo, S., O. Kishon, Y. Orchan, Y. Bartan, N. Sapir, Y. Vortman, and R. Nathan, (2014) Lightweight low-cost wildlife tracking tags using integrated transceivers | in Proc. 6th European Embedded Design in Education and Research Conference, Milan, Italy.